Esky: We Can't Stop Talking About the Boy's Wiener

To snip, or not to snip? Here's Esquire's take.

We can't stop talking about the boy's wiener. We know it's a boy and that he's going to have a wiener, but beyond that everything's up for grabs. Perhaps you've been there or are going there: a bouncing baby son. You're the father, the wife has delegated to you all male-related responsibility, and the first decision you are faced with, on behalf of this perfect miniature man, is, Would you like a little off the top?

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Only a few years ago, there wasn't much agony, at least on the decision-making end. Penile pruning was standard in American hospitals, except for boys from families that, due to perfectly acceptable cultural differences, like to make a party out of hacking off foreskins. These days, though, the disposition of the boy's wiener is a matter of extended discourse between you and the wife and among family and friends and their families and including coworkers, people standing behind you in line, and other interested parties.

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The newspaper clippings come FYI-ing in, reporting on the most recent wiener waffling by the American Academy of Pediatrics. (This time stating emphatically that "existing scientific evidence demonstrates potential medical benefits of newborn male circumcision; however, these data are not sufficient to recommend routine neonatal circumcision.") And there are the multigenerational xeroxes of Dr. Paul Fleiss's 6,242-word anti-wiener-whacking diatribe in Mothering. "The experience of the ages has shown that babies thrive best in a trusting atmosphere of love, gentleness, respect, acceptance, nurturing, and intimacy. Cutting off a baby's foreskin shatters this trust," the prominent Los Angeles pediatrician wrote unmincingly. (And Dr. Fleiss parents what he preaches, having raised at least one like-minded daughter. "I figure a man is probably born with a foreskin for a reason," Heidi Fleiss has said. "I've had sex with plenty of guys who weren't circumcised.")

Seeking succor, we go where we go whenever we want to find others who have thought about something too much — the Internet — but here we find not the fellowship of uncertainty, only preputial proselytizing. There's the NOHARMM (National Organization to Halt the Abuse and Routine Mutilation of Males) home page, which offers genital-integrity ribbons "rich in symbolism... The 'crossed legs' of this special ribbon are a metaphor for the position used by many nonconsenting infants and children to protect themselves from their perpetrators." Which is almost objective compared with the page featuring a sad cartoon boy asking, "Mom, Dad, why did you cut me?" or the site containing the cyber ode "In Memory of the Sexually Mutilated Child":

In memory of all the children throughout history who have died at the hands of sexual mutilators; and in memory of those who almost died, those who wanted to die, and those who wished they had died; and in memory of those who never knew that a sexual mutilator killed a beautiful, wondrous, irreplaceable part of them.

In the end, on the side of the "unkindest cut," we have only some medical mumbo jumbo about urinary-tract infections and that old bugaboo, tradition. Tradition: like father, like son, a chip off the old block and tackle. And also the tradition we had in our house of never talking about our wieners. Our father made it through our entire childhood without once directly referring to our wiener, even when its involvement in the topic at hand was implicit, and we'd like to think our own fatherhood won't include, "Son, your wiener's gotten really ripe. It's time to talk about smegma." But perhaps we're just being selfish.

We're going to have to think about it. And talk about it, in groups of three to six, and probably at some point with our mother-in-law. Then discuss it some more with the wife and with ourselves in the car. Because this is our first act of fatherhood and we want it to be right, so that when he comes to us and asks what we did or failed to do to his...